- Non-human identities outnumber humans 82-to-1, new report claims
- Security teams are focusing on identity security
- Attack vectors remain unchanged, and that’s a good thing
New research from Rubrik Zero Labs has claimed AI agents in the workplace are creating a surge of ‘non-human identities’, which are now outnumbering human users 82-to-1.
This growth comes as 90% of global leaders cite identity attacks as their top cybersecurity concern – as non-human identities are expanding the attack surface faster than security teams can keep up with.
“Managing identities in the era of AI has become a complex endeavor, especially with the labyrinth of NHIs,” company Chief Transformation Officer Kavitha Mariappan highlighted.
AI agents, or non-human identities, are creating new weak points
The risks aren’t going unnoticed, though, with 89% of organizations planning to hire staff dedicated specifically to identity security in the next year. Furthermore, 87% plan to change their IAM provider, with 58% citing security concerns as their main reason for switching.
Security experts worry it could be too little too late, though, with 89% having already incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure and another 10% planning to do so.
Three in five (58%) security leaders now expect at least half of next year’s cyberattacks to be driven by agentic AI, and only 28% believe they’d fully recover from a cyber incident within 12 hours (down 15 percentage points in one year).
More alarmingly, 89% of ransomware victims agreed to pay the ransom to recover from, or stop, the attack.
Despite an evolving landscape, common attack vectors aren’t changing. Four in five (79%) CrowdStrike detections didn’t involve malware – just the attacker logging in. Social engineering remains a key vector, with 86% of basic web app attacks today relying on stolen credentials, and non-human identities can be just as susceptible to deceit.
Social engineering (24%), legitimate credential compromise (21%), forged authentication tokens (20%) and MFA bypass (17%) are among the most popular, but that’s a good thing.
With this in mind, all security leaders need to do is tweak how they protect emerging tools from the same old threats.
So despite the surge in non-human identities, security teams aren’t actually faced with new challenges, just more systems to lock down.
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